Islamic Captors Claim to Have Killed Higgins : Life of a 2nd U.S. Hostage Is Threatened

Islamic militants in Beirut said Monday they have hanged Marine Lt. Col. William R. Higgins, an American hostage, in retaliation for the Israeli abduction of a Shiite Muslim clergyman in southern Lebanon, and a second group threatened to kill another U.S. hostage, Joseph J. Cicippio, by 8 a.m. PDT today unless the clergyman is freed.

The first group of militants, members of the radical Organization of the Oppressed on Earth, turned over a videotape showing a man hanging from a gallows and declared that the body was that of Higgins.

“The American spy was hanged at 3 p.m. (5 a.m. PDT Monday) to make him a lesson,” said a statement delivered with the videotape to a Western news agency in Beirut. “Let America and Israel shoulder the whole responsibility.”

The tape was delivered two hours after the radicals’ deadline for the release of Sheik Abdel Karim Obeid had passed, with Obeid still in Israeli custody. On Friday, Israeli commandos seized Obeid, who maintains close ties to Iranian-backed Hezbollah radicals, from his home in Jibchit, Lebanon. The Organization of the Oppressed on Earth is a Hezbollah faction.

No immediate confirmation of Higgins’ death could be obtained, although several viewers of the grainy, poor-quality videotape released Monday said the body appeared to be that of the 44-year-old Marine. He was head of a U.N. truce observer force in southern Lebanon when he was kidnaped near Tyre on Feb. 17, 1988.

But there was nothing in the videotape that fixed the date when it was shot. Unconfirmed reports from Lebanon since Higgins’ kidnaping said he had died after repeated torture. He was never seen by other foreign hostages in Lebanon.

3 Possible Interpretations

Analysts said there were three possible interpretations of the video: It was Higgins, and he was hanged Monday; it was Higgins, and he was killed earlier but the tape was not released until Monday to maximize its political impact; it was not Higgins.

In related developments Monday:

-- President Bush canceled a two-day trip in the West and Midwest and returned to the White House, saying that the reported murder is a “matter that has shocked the American people right to the core.” On Monday evening, he called on “all parties” holding hostages in the Middle East to release them “as a humanitarian gesture, to begin to reverse the cycle of violence.”

-- On Capitol Hill, Republican Senate leader Bob Dole of Kansas harshly criticized Israel, declaring, “Perhaps a little more responsibility on behalf of the Israelis would be refreshing.”

-- Secretary of State James A. Baker III, at the Cambodian peace conference in Paris, called the killing “outrageous and uncivilized” and said “kidnaping and violence is not something the United States agrees with.” But a senior State Department official who is familiar with Baker’s thinking told reporters later that the secretary of state “did not intend to be critical of Israel.”

-- Fifteen minutes after the deadline passed, Israel formally offered to trade all Lebanese Shiite prisoners in its hands, including Obeid, in return for all Israeli and foreign captives held by Shiite groups in Lebanon. The offer was made by Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who said foreign hostages had been put in danger by the extremists’ reaction to the abduction of Obeid and two associates.

The new threat to Cicippio, the 58-year-old deputy controller of the American University of Beirut, came from the Revolutionary Justice Organization, which also claims to hold another American hostage, Edward A. Tracy. The threat was handwritten in a note in Arabic and delivered to the Beirut newspaper An Nahar with a smiling photograph of Cicippio, who was abducted Sept. 12, 1986.

Later Monday, someone claiming to represent the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth called the Associated Press office in Nicosia, Cyprus, and said Church of England envoy Terry Waite, another of the Western hostages in Lebanon, will be executed today. No group has previously claimed to hold Waite.

Accused of Spying

Higgins, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, was serving with the United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization when he was kidnaped just one month after his arrival in Lebanon. His kidnapers accused him of using his position to spy. Before Monday’s report, a total of 733 U.N. peacekeepers had died in the line of duty around the world.

Higgins was seized shortly after leaving the home of an official of the pro-Syrian Amal militia, a rival of Hezbollah for power among Lebanese Shiites. Amal guerrillas joined U.N. troops in a frantic search for the American officer after his abduction was reported, but his captors slipped themselves and their hostage through the net.

If his death is confirmed, Higgins would be the third American hostage killed by his Lebanese kidnapers. Peter Kilburn of San Francisco, a librarian at the American University of Beirut who was abducted in December, 1984, was murdered by his captors in April, 1986. And William Buckley, a political officer at the American Embassy identified by his kidnapers as the CIA station chief in Beirut, died in captivity in 1985, a year after his abduction.

Higgins, of Danville, Ky., was a graduate of Miami University in Ohio and held master’s degrees from Pepperdine and Auburn universities. His wife, Robin, is a major in the Marine Corps and works at the Pentagon, but took personal leave starting Monday morning. Higgins has a 17-year-old daughter, Christine, from his first marriage to Bonita Spalding of Louisville, Ky.

Appeal to Captors

In Washington, Robin Higgins watched the videotape from Lebanon but said she was unable to determine whether it was her husband. She appealed to the captors “to put an end to this needless cycle of violence and victimization by releasing my husband right now and sending him home.”

President Bush said he had called Robin Higgins after hearing the reports of her husband’s death and described her as a “wonderfully stoic individual.”

The tape purportedly showing Higgins’ body contained two 15-second segments, according to reporters who saw it in Beirut on Monday. The first showed a man, turning slowly on the gallows, bound hand and foot with rope and blindfolded with a cloth. The second sequence showed him without the blindfold. The man was wearing trousers and a jacket and was barefoot.

Reporters said the body looked pale and thin. Higgins had a robust build when he was abducted.

Accompanying the tape was the typewritten statement, one page in Arabic script, declaring that the American was killed because “criminal America and the Zionist enemy (Israel) did not take seriously our decision to execute the American spy Higgins and release Sheik Obeid and his two relatives within the deadline.”

The threat to kill Higgins was issued Sunday by the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth. In the statement delivered with the videotape Monday, the militants said that if Obeid were not now released, their next action “will be ever worse.”

There was no response to Rabin’s proposal of a prisoner swap, and Israeli officials said they, too, could not confirm Higgins’ death.

“We have no proof of this message, and we hope it is not true,” Deputy Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a reporter. Foreign Minister Moshe Arens declared: “These people from Hezbollah are not people who can be believed. We don’t know whether what they are saying is true.”

Over the weekend, Israeli newspapers published leaked reports that one of the safehouses used by Higgins’ abductors as they fled the dragnet was the home of Obeid, 36.

Israeli officials initially accused Obeid of masterminding attacks on Israeli troops in Israel’s self-proclaimed security zone north of its border with Lebanon. Then word was spread that the Shiite leader, who was not a well-known name outside the militant community, was involved in Higgins’ abduction.

In the face of the tepid reaction of some Western officials, some Israeli authorities insisted that their commando strike met with unspoken approval. Said Ehud Olmert, a minister of Arab affairs in the Jerusalem government: “I believe that this is one of those events that politicians condemn publicly and admire privately.”

In Iran, where the revolutionary government of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini gave strong political and financial support to Hezbollah, reaction was mixed. Hard-line Interior Minister Ali Akbar Mohtashemi had called the threat to Higgins “very natural.”

Israel, U.S. Threatened

“Militant groups throughout the world will take action against the interests of Israel and the United States,” he said Sunday. “They will not allow them to live comfortably.”

But Prime Minister Hussein Moussavi said the Iranian government opposes the taking of hostages. In the weeks preceding last Friday’s presidential election in Iran, which set in place a successor to Khomeini, there had been hints that the new regime might work for a release of the foreign hostages in Lebanon, which, including Higgins, numbered 15, nine of them Americans.

Times staff writers Daniel Williams in Jerusalem and Norman Kempster in Paris contributed to this story.

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